10 years ago Fallout was finished and began making its journey into the hands and hearts of RPG fans everywhere. Seems more like a birthday than an anniversary. Perhaps it’s both. I do actually remember the release of Fallout in part because at the time I was working (part-time) at The Adrenaline Vault and Interplay was one of “my companies.”

In other words, I was our main point of contact for them, reviewed and previewed most of their games, etc. (along with 3DO, Interactive Magic, MGM Interactive, 7th Level…I sense a trend here). I don’t think I reviewed it because we had someone at AVault who was focusing on RPGs at the time and I let them review it, since they had primarily played every other RPG that was out at the time. But I did play it and I kept my copy, which sits proudly…somewhere in my office, I think. Sorry, off on a tangent here…where were we?

Fallout. 10 years. We bounced around a lot of ideas on how we could best honor Fallout and its 10th Anniversary/Birthday. We decided that we should do something we’ve never done before for any of our games (that I’m aware of anyway): give fans a chance to create something we’ll use in the game. We talked about it and we thought perhaps the best option was to do something where folks could be creative in a way that is very much Fallout, and not have it be overly complex. We also didn’t want it to be trivial (e.g., “name this person, creature, thing”).

So we went with designing a Perk. Perks are a big part of what makes Fallout the game and series it is. It’s a great part of the character system, there’s room for creativity, you can use your artistic skills if you want, they use Vault Boy…seemed a good choice. If you need to brush up on your Fallout Perks, perhaps a trip over to The Vault wiki over on Wikia might be in order to brush up on your Fallout and Fallout 2 Perks.

After the contest is over, we’ll go through and select the best entry. If you win, you get your Perk in Fallout 3 and your name in the credits. Immortalized forever as part of the series you love. Plus, you win a big pile of schwag for your troubles. And, so we can share the love, we have another big pile of schwag to give away to runners-up, honorable mentions, people that made us laugh, really creative ideas, and some names we’ll pull at random so that folks have a chance to win just by entering.

We’ve got some Fallout 3 items that everyone keeps asking us for — bobbleheads, a Vault-Tec lunchbox or two, some Vault Boy decals/stickers, couple t-shirts — and we’ve also gotten some great prizes donated by Logitech, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and ATI. So you can walk away with video cards, keyboards, controllers…who knows what else. Many thanks to the good folks at those companies that contributed some really cool stuff for people to win.

The contest will run from today through the end of October. We’ll announce the winners next month after we go through what is sure to be a very long list of entries. So what are you doing sitting there reading this drivel? Take your Mentats and get to work! Click here to visit the Contest Page.

Something puzzles me though. You say we shouldn’t worry about any stat or level requirements. That’s fine. But how can we explain what we have envisioned for the Perk? Should people just submit some flavour text (ie., “you are strong and bulky”) and leave that as inspiration for the devs, or can we suggest actual game mechanics in the text (ie., “you are strong (+1 Strength) and bulky (+10lbs to inventory)?

I think if you want to get a little more technical about the stat, that’s fine if you think it will strengthen your submission. If there’s a perk that we REALLY like but find that the stat level requirements don’t match up with what we’re putting in the game, we can always work with the author of the perk.

It does, thanks My concern was that sometimes in Fallout games, a Perk can be entirely made up of flavour text (for instance, the Explore Perk will only say players have a chance of finding special encounters) while at other times it could include more technical information across said text (such as Harmless, which also brings up the percentage gained to the Steal skill). And I couldn’t really get which of those Bethesda was aiming for.

I won’t be submitting any stat or level requirements for Perks, though; probably some small piece of text just explaining how the Perk works.